Unhappy Meals

It is a bit of a long read, so here are some of my favorite points from the article:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by “nutrients,” which are not the same thing.

The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not quite the same as nutrition. As the “ism” suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient.

Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex as, on the one side, a food, and on the other, a human eater.

We also eat foods in combinations and in orders that can affect how they’re absorbed.

Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. (Note that these ecological relationships are between eaters and whole foods, not nutrients)

The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking.

As we’ve shifted from leaves to seeds, the ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s in our bodies has shifted, too.